The Second Coming

“But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.”

The narration creates a sense of doubt over whether or not Will’s suicidal feelings are the result of mental illness or societal failings, even though it seems to affirm that the problem lies with Will. By using blunt language and avoiding euphemism, Percy creates a shocking and darkly humorous tone.

“Is it not a matter for astonishment that such a man, having succeeded in life and living in a lovely home with a lovely view, surrounded by good cheerful folk, family and friends, merry golfers, should now find himself on a beautiful Sunday morning sunk in fragrant German leather speculating about such things as the odd look of his wrist (his wrist was perfectly normal), the return of North Carolina Jews to the Holy Land (there was no such return), and looking for himself in mirrors like Count Dracula?”

Percy contrasts the dark subject matter with lighthearted prose. He employs asides, written in parentheses, which help to establish that Will is experiencing delusions as a result of his existential crisis. This sentence features an allusion to the figure of Count Dracula, a vampire who has no reflection, as a simile that suggests Will’s disassociation from his own appearance and identity.

“She felt like a snake stretched out on a rock in the sun, shedding its skin after a long hard winter.”

This description of Allison after her escape from the psychiatric hospital employs a simile that compares her actions to the process of a snake shedding its skin. The image of the snake shedding its skin after surviving a winter indicates that Allison is also undergoing a form of rebirth and rejuvenation after a difficult period in her life. Percy’s language implies that even though Allison appears still and inactive, she is actually beginning the process of dynamic change.

“For the first time in her life, she felt that it, her life, was beginning. But maybe that was because she could not remember much about her old life.”

Allison looks hopefully to the future, although her feelings are humorously undercut by the narration pointing out that she lacks memories that could provide important context. Percy’s prose often uses irony to call the character’s beliefs into question, mirroring the ambiguity and uncertainty of The Search for Signs of God.

“One might as well do one thing as another.”

Will expresses his philosophy as he realizes that all the choices he makes in life are functionally meaningless and that there is no particular value or importance to anything he does. He phrases this philosophy in the style of an aphorism, a short and witty statement that observes a universal truth. Rather than creating a tone of sadness or despair, in observing The Absurdity of Modern Life, Percy subverts the expectation that an existential crisis would cause extreme emotion.

“His eyes would grow merry as if he had set himself an impossible quest and won, had plunged into the heart of the darkness and disorder of the wet cold winter woods and extracted from it of all things a warm bright-eyed perfect bird.”

This description of Will’s father and his passion for hunting features alliteration, a literary device in which the first sound of a word is repeated. With words pairings like “darkness” and “disorder” and “wet,” “winter,” and woods,” Percy creates a musical and poetic sound to the prose. This sentence indicates how Will’s father valued glory and victory, only to become suicidal after the end of World War II, when he felt he no longer had a meaningful cause to fight for.

“But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.”

Percy uses figurative language to describe the young Will’s first brush with death while hunting with his father. While the young Will was praised for being brave and fetching help to save his father, Will was actually experiencing emotional numbness due to the trauma of his own father nearly killing him. By portraying this part of himself as the core of his personality, Will suggests that his authentic self is disconnected from the values and systems of meaning that govern the rest of the world.

“Ever since your death, all I ever wanted from you was out, out from you and from the Mississippi twilight, and from the shotguns thundering in the musty attics and racketing through funk-smelling Georgia swamps, out from the ancient hatred and allegiances, allegiances unto death and love of war and rumors of war and under it all death and your secret love of death, yes that was your secret.”

The narration switches into Will’s internal monologue as he talks to his deceased father. The text employs anaphora, a rhetorical device where the same sequence of words repeats at the beginning of multiple clauses in order to give them greater emphasis. By repeating the phrase “out from,” this sentence emphasizes that Will is desperate to escape his father’s fate.

“The arrangement is the derangement. When the arrangement is arranged, then you know what the ensuement is.”

Allison’s dialogue uses puns and linguistic jokes, indicating her unstable relationship with language. By claiming, for example, that the “arrangement” is “derangement,” Allison suggests that the circumstances of her life are causing her deranged condition. In line with the theme of The Absurdity of Modern Life, she compares the highly organized environment of the psychiatric institution to the disorganized mental state of the patients.

“The Luger felt good. Its weight and ugliness and beauty made him smile.”

Will’s description of the Luger uses verbal irony and juxtaposition, employing terms like “ugliness” and “beauty” that should be opposites yet are both descriptors of the gun. This sentence represents the complex emotions that Will has toward death and suicide, desiring it while also being repelled by it due to his trauma over his father’s death by suicide.

“I said only that the question can be put in such a way that an answer is required. It will be stipulated, moreover, that a non-answer, silence, shall be construed to mean no.”

As Will conceives of his plan to either end his life or prove the existence of God, he phrases it in language that sounds like legal jargon. As a former lawyer, Will is familiar with the terminology and structure of language in legal contexts, a skill that he later employs to help Allison. In the context of The Search for Signs of God, however, Will’s effort to simplify and concretize the question of God’s existence ultimately ends in ambiguity.

“She truly gave herself to others, served God and her fellow man with a good and cheerful heart—and ate and ate and ate, her eyes as round and glittering as a lover’s.”

Will’s memories of his wife, Marion, contrast two of her major traits: her passion for charity and her appetite for food. Will believes that Marion’s excessive diet led to her premature death, mirroring Will’s love of death. This quote employs polysyndeton, repetition of conjunctions, with the insertion of the conjunction “and” into the sentence to slow its rhythm and emphasize the excessive nature of Marion’s love of food.

“Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?”

Will’s internal monologue addresses his dead father, whom he refers to as “old mole,” drawing on the narrative’s motif of animals. He uses a rhetorical question, asking his father about the similarities between love and death even though his father is deceased and cannot answer. This question indicates that Will is uncertain about his own feelings and using his dead father as a representation of his own suicidal impulses.

“Where does such rage come from? From the discovery that in the end the world yields only to violence, that only the violent bear it away, that short of violence all is in the end impotence?”

Will experiences a sudden feeling of resentment and anger at a man of another ethnicity, then contemplates why he had this reaction. His internal monologue uses two rhetorical questions as he thinks through this issue, making what could have been confident statements into ambiguous questions. The repetition of “violence” draws attention to the uncomfortable idea that Will is contemplating.

“So it was that Will Barrett went mad. His peculiar delusion and the strange pass it brought him to would be comical if it were not so perilous.”

The narrative voice shifts away from Will’s point of view and into a more omniscient narrator who comments on Will’s mental condition. By drawing away from the more immediate perspective, Percy creates a comedic, nonchalant effect. The narrator also dismisses Will’s existential concerns as irrational, calling into question the rationality of Will’s bargain with God.

“Madness! Madness! Madness! Yet such was the nature of Will Barrett’s peculiar delusion when he left his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and set forth on the strangest adventure of his life, descended into the Lost Cove cave looking for proof of the existence of God and a sign of the apocalypse like some crackpot preacher in California.”

This sentence uses ecphonesis, a rhetorical device where an emotional, exclamatory phrase creates drama and excitement. The omniscient narration features a simile that compares Will’s actions to the behavior of a crackpot preacher, dismissing his search for divinity as absurd irrationality. Percy uses this narrative voice to add to the ambiguity surrounding whether or not Will’s concerns with modern life are valid or the result of illness.

“The great stove had come out of the dark earth with a crack and a suck, roots popping. It reminded her of her father extracting a molar.”

Allison’s description of the stove emerging from the cellar employs figurative language and onomatopoeia. By comparing the stove to a molar being pulled out by a dentist, Percy creates a disgusting image of bodily violation. Likewise, the image of the stove emerging from the earth parallels the emergence of corpses from the ground during the last judgement in the Bible, adding to the sense of fear and horror that would accompany the apocalypse.

“The cave air was simpler. It had a wet metal culvert smell. He opened his mouth. Clean ferrous ions blew onto his tongue.”

Will’s description of the cave uses scientific jargon to associate the air with metal. Percy often employs scientific and medical language to call into question the spiritual quests of characters, suggesting that perhaps all of their experiences are merely the result of chemistry and biology. In this instance, the affiliation of the cave air with metal subtly hints that Will is using the cave in the same way that his father used a metal gun to end his life.

“Whatever is alive here is more than a dying tiger. Yet it is not a tiger giving birth or a tiger molting and being transformed like a cicada. It is the same tiger but different.”

As Will begins to hallucinate from hunger and taking sleeping pills, his narrative voice becomes fragmented and confusing. As he imagines a dying tiger lying beside him, he meditates on the transformative process of death. Rather than the renewing transformation that animals undergo during birth or metamorphosis, the death of the tiger transforms it without creating anything.

“Why not live alone if it is people who bother me? Why not live in a world of books and brooks but no looks?”

Allison’s internal monologue employs rhyme, a technique unusual in prose, representing her unusual relationship to language. By thinking that she enjoys books and brooks, Allison suggests that living mostly isolated in the woods has helped her to escape the pressure of “looks,” meaning the expectations of other people in society.

“Ah, but what if the death is not in the century but in your own genes, that you of all men are a child of the century because you are death-bound by your own hand as the century is and you of all men should be most at home now, as bred for death as surely as a pointer bitch to point, that death your own death is what you really love and won’t be happy till you have, what then.”

Will’s moment of realization after he emerges from the cave is expressed using a complex, run-on sentence that features multiple instances of repetition. This sentence sets up a comparison between Will’s suicidal ideation and the suicidal impulse of the 20th century, a period of war and technological upheaval. During this time, many people feared humanity was on a path to annihilate itself through nuclear weaponry.

“Yes, he felt exactly as he felt when he was drafted in the army, a dazed content and a mild curiosity. His life was out of his hands.”

This passage features a metonym, a figure of speech where one attribute of something is substituted for the whole concept. Will says that his life is out of his hands, with his hands representing the idea of control and agency. By comparing the experience of losing control of his life to being drafted into the army, Percy suggests that the feeling of purpose that many men find through war is not actually granting them agency and free choice; instead, it engenders relief through removing choice.

“Fewer hydrogen ions were zipping around the heavy alkaline molecules sweet with memory and desire. Perhaps a slight case of Hausmann’s Syndrome was better than none at all.”

Percy’s prose uses scientific jargon and medical language to call into question whether Will’s emotional response is simply the result of his disease. This tension plays into the larger existential question of the novel—if rational science can explain everything in the universe, what is the purpose of existence? By admitting that there was something pleasing about Will’s epileptic medical disorder, Percy indicates that this tension is not entirely resolved; rather, Will has made his peace with it and found his own sense of value for his experiences.